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How to Make Easy Lunches Every Week

It’s 4pm on Sunday afternoon, and you’re relaxing in your armchair. The Monday blues haven’t quite started because you’ve still got a solid 6 hours left before you have to start thinking about tomorrow morning.

All of the sudden, something flickers across your mind: “What am I going to eat for lunch this week?” It’s a thought that’s pretty easy to ignore, because you’ve always got a backup plan: waking up earlier to make something or ordering food at work. So you continue watching the afternoon game or blame Netflix for starting the next episode too quickly.

Fast forward to Monday morning. It’s getting late. You’ve chosen to snooze, take a bit of extra time in the shower to clean the weekend dirt out from behind your ears, and the toaster was taking forever.

All of the sudden, the lunch thought flickers back, and deja vu hits. A million times you’ve been through this process, and each time it’s the same. You could 1) make a quick sandwich that will leave you hungrier than before you ate it or 2) order in and have it hurt your insides, your wallet, or both.

The Boring Monday Morning Sandwich

Now you realize, like you do every week, that you hate the backup plan more than DJ Khaled’s singing without autotune (or with it). The problem with your backup plan is that over the short-term, it’s easy to do every day. But over the long-run, it makes you feel like crap. To paraphrase your thoughts about the lunch quandary in the words of your inner teenage girl: you just can’t even. Eating the same thing for lunch sucks.

After wishing you had a way to make easy lunches every week and avoid this feeling all together, you curse your 4pm-Sunday self and realize you could have visited Average Dude Food while the game was on and solved the problem for the entire week. Why?, you ask yourself. I can cook, sort-of, but how come I just can’t motivate myself to do it?

Don’t blame yourself. We at Average Dude Food think we know why this happens: analysis paralysis.

Stop being hung up by too many choices

Analysis paralysis is a common affliction. For example: choosing something off a menu at a restaurant. There are so many things, and maybe they’re all good. You pick out a few, then ask your friends what they’re getting, then ask the waiter what they recommend. You can’t decide, so you ask to pick last, even though you know that two minutes later you still won’t know. Why are restaurant menus so cruel, you think. In the end, you pick the sesame chicken, because you’ve had it before.

In many cases, more choice is not better. When it comes to food, an Average Dude probably falls into the restaurant menu trap each week: you don’t want the same thing as before (a sandwich), but there are too many choices to pick from to try something new. So you end up doing the same thing for lunch, which is boring or costs you lots of money. We at Average Dude Food have been having this issue for years, so we created a solution.

Your brain only has so much bandwidth to handle choices. We recognize this, which is why we don’t run a food site like all the others. They’ve got hundreds if not thousands of recipes for you to browse and never cook. We give you one each week. No deliberation, no wasted time.

We’re not deciding for you. You’re absolutely welcome to browse our other recipes and choose something else. We’re just here helping you make the easy choices easy. By visiting us, you are deciding to take control of your food, your health, your time, and your money.

When it comes to choices like your lunch, let us do the hard work for you. Don’t let something so simple waste more of your time and money than necessary.

How to use this site

Using this site to is very easy. It works best if you subscribe at the bottom of the page. We’ll send you one email per week with a recipe, which will make 5 lunches. All you need to do is pull up our email on your phone, stop by the grocery store, and spend a few minutes cooking at home. You’ll have delicious meals that are easy to make, and you won’t ever have to feel bad again about making a run to the food court. You can also simply visit our This Week’s Lunch page to get started.